The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

What a difference Flour can make...

PetraR's picture
PetraR

What a difference Flour can make...

.... I used the same flour brand for about 1 Year now, always got good results in Crust and Crumb, nice crusty crust and lovely crumb.

The last month I got bad results, the crust always came out soft/is and the crumb had changed.

I had not changed the forumla at all, used my standard Sourdough bread formula for everyday baking.

Preferment

1tbsp rye Starter

45g bread flour

 5g wholemeal flour

50g water.

 

Dough

All of the preferment

450g bread flour

 50g wholemeal flour

350g water

  20g Salt

It was so anoying that the bread started to turn out so differend.

I did not do anything differend from what I done before.

 

My hubby got me a more expensive brand of flour and voila, the bread turned out so beautiful, just as it always did before.

I wonder what happend.

I can imagine that one of the 1.5 kg flour bags had gone strange/ bad but not all the flour that I bough over the month.

I stick to the more expensive one, not THAT expensive but more. 

 

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

That Lucy and I were millers and the boss came in and said 'We are losing money and you might lose your jobs unless you come up with a way to cut costs or improve efficiency"  After the boss left,  Lucy looked at the floor and it was covered with flour.  She said we should sweep it up. bag it and sell it as super duper, multigrain flour that was rested to perfection at low altitude for $3 a pound,  We did and it became a huge hit.  Next thing you know we didn't have enough flour from the floor to bag up and this was now our best seller so .....we took the sifter off the bottom of the mill and blew the flour all over the mill floor a couple feet deep.   We sucked it up with a shop vac to bag it.

Next thing you know we are retired and sitting on the beach in Nice sipping wine, eating cheese and meats with a good well rested, super duper, multigrain baguette. 

You must have got a bag of Lucy's flour sucked up form the mill floor. 

FlyinAggie's picture
FlyinAggie

What a great lesson in economics!  Lower prices; don't raise wages to encourage business!  I love it! 

PetraR's picture
PetraR

I guess I did lol.

Mind you, good ingredients make good food, so I pay a bit more but we have bread that we all enjoy.

embth's picture
embth

I knew someone who worked for decades at the huge factory bakery of a now defunct East Coast grocery store chain.  He always said their "Hermit" cookies were made from what they swept off the floor.  They tasted pretty good.    : )

baliw2's picture
baliw2

20g is a lot.
2% is pretty standard. Europe it is less.

PetraR's picture
PetraR

I tried less salt but it had no taste, none of the family nor I liked it.

baliw2's picture
baliw2

Did you mean 20g per double the flour you posted?

PetraR's picture
PetraR

No, as it said in the formula:)

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

That is the min it takes to kill them  The yeast are OK up to 8% but at 4% people will be dropping dead first:-)  They did a  study here showing that Americans eat 3 time the am-out of salt they should and 80% of it came from bread they ate!  A black eye for bread bakers for sure.  In your case, you are eating about 5 time the salt you should if you eat a normal amount of your bread.  O like 1.75% salt since the SD is so flavorful all by itself..

I say cut the salt and live twice as long.

baliw2's picture
baliw2

I would have a stroke. We used to salt food like that in the restaurant many years ago when we needed to sell beverages.

You don't need that much salt. 2.5% is pretty much the limit. I have had Neapolitan pizza with more salt but we needed to consume a lot of beer to compensate.

PetraR's picture
PetraR

I do tink you are right there baliw2, I just had a slice that tasted very salty, I shall reduce the salt to 11g.

Maverick's picture
Maverick

Protein content and the like can vary harvest to harvest. This batch must have been a little different. Most of the time the larger name brands are more consistent, but not always. I assume it was the bread flour that was changed. Was the whole meal the same?

PetraR's picture
PetraR

Yes, the whole meal was the same as before.

I spoke with 2 other Ladies that bake bread and they had the same experience with the flour, suddenly their bread was * dull * in crust and crumb.

baliw2's picture
baliw2

It can have a big effect on volume, color, crumb, crust, etc.

I know you knew that already but I thought I would throw that out there

PetraR's picture
PetraR

I should have made Image of one of my latest loafs with the * old * flour and yesterdays loaf with the new flour, the difference is quite dramatic.

I could not believe it.

Just so sad that a former great flour that was also a bit cheaper suddenly turned out not to be so good anymore, I am not alone in that.

You are right to reduce the Salt, yesterday I did not taste the salt that much, strange.

baliw2's picture
baliw2

I reduced the salt for my bread at home to 1.5%. Since I started doing that I got used to it. In Europe there are laws where we are from that limit the amount of salt in commercial bread so we chose that amount because it is similar. We also eat a lot of bread in our house! Here is a nice post about this subject from a website I like. Of course our Dutch bread is not as good as American bread. ;-)

http://www.weekendbakery.com/posts/salt-in-bread-baking-how-much-and-why/

AbeNW11's picture
AbeNW11 (not verified)

Crops were affected by the weather. Resulted in poor gluten. Common problem was bread not rising. Advice being given was to add a teaspoon of lemon juice to the dough and voila better results.

There is so much going on in making bread it could be a number of things. If one part of the equation is out then you'll have a bad result. Now i'm not saying it is one thing or another as it could be a number of things. But even flour can vary from crop to crop.